Expert Interview: Is Your Business Throwing Valuable Leads Away?

Dan Monaghan, the co-founder of WSI, was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series to share his insight on building the world’s largest digital marketing network. The Expert Interview Series explores the business technology landscape through conversations with industry leaders.

Monaghan joined Clark Buckner to discuss social selling, funnel optimization, lead generation, and marketing automation.

TechnologyAdvice: With over twenty years experience in digital marketing, how have you seen advanced tools and strategies like social selling and marketing automation software change the B2B space?

Monaghan: Well first of all, there’s a lot of buzz out there about social selling. The one thing I would say, is it’s a bit of a misnomer. We think of social selling as really more about social marketing.

You know, the term social selling sounds great, but, it’s really about lead generation.

Back in the 90’s, if you hired a salesperson you’d say, “He or she has a great rolodex.” I was trying to explain to my daughter the other day what a rolodex was and I had to grab a picture from Google images. Today the world’s largest rolodex is online and it’s available to everyone. It’s called LinkedIn.

So, the question is, how do we engage? How do we target the right customers that are going to generate the highest gross margin? How do we engage and turn a relationship or connection into a lead and into a customer? We have a whole methodology for this and it’s being used by some of the largest companies in the world— whether it’s Salesforce or Oracle or anyone else.

And so, social selling: yes, it’s about selling and making a sale. But before that, it’s about generating a lead. So we really look at it as a way to create a flood of leads into a business.

TA: What social selling and marketing automation strategies do your corporate partners use in their inbound marketing approach to generate leads?

Monaghan: We’re a Google partner, who has the largest agency footprint in the world. We’re one of Hubspot’s largest partners, along with Constant Contact. Partners drive a lot of value to our clients within the WSI world.

Marketing automation is an area that business people really need to take note of. Let’s say that for every hundred people you send to your website, you get five people that become customers, or they become leads, or somehow engaged with your brand.

That means 95 people didn’t engage with you.

Marketing automation is about, “Okay, great, we’ve got those five, but, what do we do with the other 95? Do they just go in the garbage?”

And in fact, if we could turn that five into ten– through ongoing nurturing of those people who visit our site– then we have an opportunity to transform the return on investment, transform the market share gains, and literally crush our competition. imply changing your conversion from five percent to ten percent can have a transformational impact on your business.

Marketing automation is a great way to do that because we take those other 95 percent of the people who didn’t engage with you and we nurture them through the funnel over time so that they ultimately do engage. What most businesses do is skim the cream off the top, they take the five percent or eight percent, and everything else goes in the garbage.